The Foundation for Critical Thinking has an excellent definition of “Critical Thinking”:
[T]he intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.
Note that the above definition is no less accurate when we separate it into two elements:
Element #1:
The intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully
evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication.
Element #2:
The intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully
conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, and synthesizing evaluated information as a guide to belief and action.
Element #1 skills, also known as
critical evaluation skills, are not usually required to judge the quality or veracity of the information students receive in class; sch